Another day, another cake

Today is my nephew's (Jack) birthday.  He's SEVEN.  Holy Cow!  I keep wondering how the heck it is that time goes by so fast when you're an adult but it seems to drag on forever and ever when you're a kid.  I swear when I was a kid it seemed like Christmas only rolled around once every other year.  As a parent it feels like I blink and it's Christmas again!  I really wish time would slow the heck down!

My sister asked me last week if I would be willing to do cupcakes for Jack's birthday.  Of course I said yes. She told me he wanted an Angry Birds party.  So, I hopped online, found a few pictures of what I wanted to do and made a shopping list.  Here's what I found pictures of online....

Here's how mine turned out...

I also made a cake so the family can eat more cake after the party is over!  How nice is that? ;)

Now that I've done this once, there are a few things I'd do a bit different. 

1. When I went shopping I originally couldn't find any black licorice pieces to do the eyebrows.  I had resigned to having to do them with chocolate frosting colored black.  Finally, I came across some black licorice ropes.  Boy am I glad I did!  No way would I have liked the eye brows nearly as much if they were frosting.

2. I think the beaks might need to have been cut a bit smaller.  They are made out of the sugary orange slices.  I just cut one slice in half to get two beaks.  But, since I couldn't fit a half a large marshmallow onto the cupcakes as the white stomach, I think I would try a smaller beak to fit the stomach.

3. I put the sugary sprinkles on all the cupcakes because it showed them on the cupcakes in the pictures I was copying.  I don't know that I love the sprinkles.  The way the sprinkles are on the red bird in the picture, they are different sprinkles (just regular red sprinkles, not necessarily the sugary kind).  You'd have to frost the cupcake and then roll the cupcake in it and then put the rest of the face on the cupcake.  I don't think the rest of the items would stick to the cupcake as well if you did it this way.  I think I'd just omit the sprinkles all together next time.

4. The noses on the naughty pigs were difficult to do.  I cut a large marshmallow in half (so it didn't stand up so high off the cupcake).  I placed the marshmallow half onto the cupcake, frosted the top of the marshmallow and then frosted the sides.  Since I used homemade/scratch cream cheese frosting and the frosting was warmer than it probably should have been, there was a lot of sliding around.  Not sure how to get around this problem for next time.

5. I don't love the "horn" things on the red bird.  I think I'd leave those off next time.

6. Don't cut your black licorice eyebrow pieces too long.  Mine are roughly an inch-inch and a half.  I think they could have been a bit shorter.

7. I really wanted to do some of the naughty pigs like the one with the little marshmallows for teeth.  However, the cupcakes I made just weren't big enough.  I don't know if I needed to make bigger cupcakes (I made regular sized cupcakes), change the nose somehow, or just squoosh everything up higher.  There also really isn't room for the red jelly bean tongue on the pig that I did do, so I left that off.

8. The eyeballs on all the birds/pigs are mini marshmallows with mini chocolate chips squeezed into them.  I wondered if I'd need to use a dab of frosting to keep the chocolate chip in or if they'd stay if I just squished them together.  I just squished them together and so far, so good.  I did use large marshmallows and regular chocolate chips on the cake angry bird instead of the minis.

Overall, I think they turned out cute.  I hope my nephew likes them anyway.  I'm starting to branch out and do cakes that don't have specific pans to cook them in.  Scary!  But so far, they've turned out to be lots of fun to make and really cute to look at.  I heard the penguin tasted pretty good too!

Happy baking!